Cars also have bugs

In the last two weeks I took a couple of friends and my car to a trip around Deutschland and then some more. When I do this kind of road trips, the last thing I do each night is to take a picture of the dashboard with the trip counter showing the accumulated kilometers. Last year we did a slightly shorter one all the way to Praha and back, and on the last day I noticed that the counter seemed to reset a little bit beforehand. See, the trip counter only shows three integer digits and one decimal digit, so once it reaches 1000 km (1mm! Just not the small one :), it shows 000.0 again. So in this trip to Praha, while coming back, the counter reseted back to 0, so at the end of the trip I was not sure how many kilometers I did, only that it was around 3.5k km.

This time we were in the way between Hamburg and Köln when it happened again. This time I was sure we were around 3.2k km when it happened, and suddenly it struck me. But let me tell you how I was sure first.

In the first night, the numbers read 207780 for the total counter and 752.2 for the trip, which makes the start at around 207027.8. The last night they read 212048 and 743.3. Subtracting this last total counter to the belated start value makes some 5020.2 km!

Now, let's go back to the strange resetting problem. It's around the 3200.0 km mark, and the counter is digital. Digital counters need bits to count, and the amount of bits available determine the maximum number these bits can count. Also, this counter has a decimal place for counting kilometers... but what if it actually counted hundreds of meters (hectometers) and the display is just a representation? That would make the reset at around 32000 hectometers, hmm...

I just wonder why the technicians at BMW decided 20 years ago (my car is old) to use what looks like a signed int for this. With a two byte signed int a counter can go as up as 32767. If you're counting hectometers, that makes 3276.7 km, which seems to match the resetting point. Then, if we add the number from the last night, we get 4020.0. I knew that after Köln the digits shown wrapped once around 1000 km, so we end up with 5020.0 for the real trip. It's a suspiciously round number, but it's only a 1 in 10 probability.

So, cars can have bugs too. This time is just annoying bug for those us crazy people who make trips longer than 3.2k km, but with the tendency of making cars more and more dependent on computers (self-driving cars are the most clear cases), we have to be aware that worse things can happen. But then, we already have self-flying planes, which can even land mostly by themselves.